Beacon Broadside: A Project of Beacon Presstag:typepad.com,2003:weblog-14005452020-04-28T16:42:45-04:00Ideas, opinions, and personal essays from respected writers, thinkers, and activists. A project of Beacon Press, an independent publisher of progressive ideas since 1854.TypePad‘Yes’ Is Not Enough: An #EarthDay Letter to the Climate Movementtag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00e54ed2b7aa88330240a5251147200b2020-04-28T16:42:45-04:002020-04-28T17:30:48-04:00By Wen Stephenson | As I write, it is six weeks since everything changed where I live, in eastern Massachusetts, when the schools closed and businesses began sending their employees home. Today the Boston Globe reports 39,643 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the state, and at least 1,809 deaths, more than 400 of them in my county. The US now has more than three-quarters of a million confirmed cases and at least 37,000 deaths, most likely far more, with 2,000 or more dying per day—and unconscionably disproportionate losses in Black and Brown communities. Globally, at least 166,000 people have died. The old and infirm, the poor, the vulnerable, the racially marginalized, suffer most. As always.Beacon Broadside

New Hampshire State Police in full riot gear arrest peaceful protesters with the grassroots #NoCoalNoGas campaign at Merrimack Station in Bow, NH, the last major coal-fired power plant in New England, on September 28, 2019. Sixty-seven were arrested, with hundreds more supporting. Photo credit: #NoCoalNoGas, NoCoalNoGas.org

Editor’s note: Read about the #NoCoalNoGas campaign, pictured above in the image header, in Wen Stephenson’s most recent piece in the Nation.

As I write, it is six weeks since everything changed where I live, in eastern Massachusetts, when the schools closed and businesses began sending their employees home. Today the Boston Globe reports 39,643 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the state, and at least 1,809 deaths, more than 400 of them in my county. The US now has more than three-quarters of a million confirmed cases and at least 37,000 deaths, most likely far more, with 2,000 or more dying per day—and unconscionably disproportionate losses in Black and Brown communities. Globally, at least 166,000 people have died. The old and infirm, the poor, the vulnerable, the racially marginalized, suffer most. As always.

At the same time, the US economy alone has lost more than 22 million jobs since the social-distancing “stay at home” orders began—an incomprehensible number in so short a span, so far off the charts that the only comparison, as we keep hearing, is to the economic collapse of the 1930s. How long it will be before the pandemic comes under control, no one knows. A year? More? For now, there is no end in sight.

But you already know all of this, so why dwell on these grim facts?

Here’s why. As we’re all too aware, this week of April was set to be a major moment for our swelling movement in the midst of this most consequential election year—what might have been our most important mobilization as a movement to date, building on the historic surge of momentum since 2018, when the Green New Deal exploded onto the national stage. And yet here we are, faced with this fearful, disorienting new reality.

Like anyone else who’s written and agitated on climate and climate justice for the past decade or more, I’ve always known that we’d have to keep working in the face of adversity and increasing instability in the coming years—but I’ll admit that I never anticipated anything so sudden and near-totally immobilizing as this. Because let’s face it, despite our best digital efforts, the coronavirus has all but taken us out of action—even as the fossil-fuel industry and its political servants exploit the crisis, doubling down on brazen climate destruction under cover of the pandemic.

I believe it has to be said: this all-consuming health and economic emergency is the most dangerous and uncertain moment we have ever faced as a movement. There’s a real anxiety among many of us, a sense that all the hard-won momentum, all the power that’s been built—as seen in the unprecedented Green New Deal coalition that helped power the transformative Bernie Sanders campaign and forced climate justice into the national debate—is in danger of stalling and ebbing away.

As a movement, we face a moment of decision. When the pandemic crisis recedes, as it eventually will, we can choose to fall in line with a corporate-political establishment, including the Democratic Party, that wants nothing more than a “return to normalcy” and politics as usual—in which the fossil-fuel economy is rescued and the climate emergency is again relegated to second- or third-tier priority. Or we can refuse to go along, remove our consent—and recommit to an escalated and intensified nonviolent struggle.

***

At a time like this, it seems important to remind ourselves where we’ve been and how we got here. Take yourself back to where it began for you. Remember the moment or moments—most of us have them—when you knew in your sinews that the climate crisis meant your life must change, and you decided to commit yourself to this work. Maybe it was last year, or maybe, if you’re among the rare few (I know some of you), last century. Remember what it felt like, the visceral realization of all that’s at stake and all that must be done if current and future generations are to have a fighting chance.

And then remember the moments—surely we’ve all had them—when the weight of it all was just too much, and you wanted nothing more than to wash your hands of it and walk away.

For myself and others I know, those latter moments came in the year following Trump’s election, when overnight we careened from the Obama-Clinton Paris Agreement, which at least paid lip service to climate reality, to Trump’s and Tillerson’s nihilistic denial—and the future went from dusk to darkness. Some of us fell into despair, turned inward, and all but gave up on the climate movement—which is not, I assure you, to judge; I was one. But in time, like many of you, I was able—with the help of friends and a caring movement community—to climb my way out of the pit.

And what I found was that the movement of movements we were building for climate justice and human rights had re-emerged—bigger, stronger, more energized—coalescing powerfully around the vision of a Green New Deal. It was led, conspicuously, by young people, some of whom I’d known and worked alongside for years, and by Indigenous andfrontline climate-justice groups for whom walking away was not an option and climate justice not an abstract concept. For a decade and more, many of these leaders and organizers, of all ages and circumstances, had been throwing themselves into the fights against fossil-fuel extraction and infrastructure—tar-sands, fracking, oil refineries, coal plants—and into the global campaign for fossil-fuel divestment, signaling to financial markets that carbon reserves are stranded assets and fossil-fuel companies are the walking dead.

Now, just as we’ve begun to feel and flex our power, we find ourselves unable to mobilize—that is, actually mobilize, together, physically, in the streets and on campuses, on the pipeline routes and railroad tracks, in the bank offices and halls of government, all the places where we cannot be ignored. There are some things we can do digitally, of course, but we all know a hashtag echo chamber offers little resistance to a ruthless industry willing to capitalize on a global health emergency.

And in this state of suspension—and, frankly, fear—as we approach the November election and (whatever may happen) try to think beyond it, there may be an impulse to let resistance slide, and to focus on the economic and public health agenda of the Green New Deal, with its positive message of jobs, clean energy, universal health care, and education. And of course this inspiring and reality-based vision is essential, especially in an election year when the stakes are no less than democracy and Earth’s climate itself. Indeed, that’s the political promise of the Green New Deal—the way it offers an affirming, broadly appealing agenda to organize around, the way it meets the vast majority of Americans where they are, addressing their daily needs, in terms of economic, social, and environmental justice. To all of these, it offers a resounding “Yes.”

But in the struggle for a livable world—and it must be a struggle—in the face of the entrenched forces lined up against us, all the organizing and advocacy our movement can muster on behalf of this positive vision, while absolutely necessary, will never be sufficient. Indeed, precisely because of this pandemic and economic collapse, our collective nonviolent resistance to the fossil fuel industry, its financial backers, and its political allies, in both parties, is more important than ever. To win anything like a Green New Deal, “Yes” will never be enough.

***

In her influential 2017 book, No Is Not Enough, written in the immediate wake of Trump’s election, my friend and colleague Naomi Klein made the compelling argument (building on 2014’s This Changes Everything) that to confront our political and climate crises together requires that positive vision, that “Yes,” and not only resistance. “We have to tell a different story,” she wrote, one that offers “a plan for the future that is credible and captivating enough that a great many people will fight to see it realized, no matter the shocks and scare tactics thrown their way.” Drawing from her experience as an instigator and co-author of the popular “Leap Manifesto” program in Canada, the northern precursor to our Green New Deal, this argument has become a kind of gospel for younger Green New Dealers to whom Klein, as Bill McKibben has noted, is something of an “intellectual godmother.”

But Naomi never argued that our movement of movements can afford to relegate resistance to the back burner. Quite the opposite. In that same book she argued, as she has long argued, that recognizing the necessity of a positive agenda “doesn’t mean that resisting the very specific attacks—on families, on people’s bodies, on communities, on individual rights—is suddenly optional. There is no choice but to resist.” It has never been an either/or. Both “yes” and “no” are equally necessary—not only morally, I would add, but strategically. It would be an historic mistake for the Green New Deal movement to de-emphasize or retreat from the kind of escalated nonviolent resistance we’ve seen in the past. After all, it was the Sunrise Movement’s large civil disobedience action, their occupation of Nancy Pelosi’s Capitol Hill office, that forced the GND into the national conversation—and we know that far more direct and disruptive action is possible.

Clearly, a pandemic is not the time for fossil-fuel resisters to be filling the jails—which would recklessly endanger our own and others’ lives. But this is also not the time to lose resolve and give up on nonviolent resistance as a strategic tool. Electoral organizing around the Green New Deal vision is, of course, essential—and at the same, it’s imperative to prepare now for an intensified nonviolent struggle against the fossil-fuel industry and our corporate-controlled political system when the pandemic recedes.

To be sure, there’s already a sense of urgency among movement thinkers making the case that we must not repeat past mistakes and waste this crisis, but use it to press for large-scale Green New Deal policies as part of the economic recovery. And yet, strong as this argument is, when the pandemic crisis has passed and the economic rebuilding begins in earnest, we’ll still find ourselves under the same political system as before, controlled by the same corporate lobbies, none more powerful than the carbon lobby. And while it may be true that fundamental change never happens without a crisis, it’s also the case that the political establishment wants no part of a crisis-level response to climate catastrophe, and that there will be (and already is) overwhelming pressure from establishment Democrats and mainstream liberals to restore “normalcy” and stick with a positive, “unifying” message—one that doesn’t “demonize” the industry and its backers, some of whom are Democratic Party funders. But normalcy is precisely what the climate justice movement urgently needs to upend. Normalcy equals catastrophe.

History shows us that nonviolent resistance is more than mere protest, more than merely performative or expressive (“speaking truth to power”); it is essentially strategic. It goes beyond words and symbols. As Gandhi and King and countless others have shown—from the Salt March to the Freedom Rides, from sit-down strikers and draft-card burners to tar-sands blockaders and water protectors—there is no more powerful means of exposing the forces a movement is up against, and no more effective way of forcing an issue, maybe even a reckoning, than sustained and strategic nonviolent direct action.

Is this too much to ask of people emerging from a pandemic and pressed by economic hardship and anxiety? Maybe so. The psychological and material impact of this current crisis is already immense—and our mutual empathy, compassion, and aid is needed. But it’s worth reminding ourselves that social movements have often maintained their struggles in the face of extreme adversity—none more so than the radical labor movement of the 1930s (an era increasingly on our minds), when workers fought successfully under harrowing conditions few today can imagine; and the Black freedom movement of the 1960s, when people gave their lives for basic civil and human rights. Given the hardship, and the incalculable injustice, we know the climate catastrophe will bring and is already bringing to the poorest and most marginalized in our society, perhaps the time has come when we need to find a comparable resolve.

Or perhaps there’s an analogy with our current situation: Even as scientists race to develop a COVID-19 vaccine and end this pandemic (a positive vision if there ever was one), doctors and nurses on the front lines are fighting day and night under extreme conditions to save as many lives as possible, putting themselves at risk. Likewise, even as we push for a Green New Deal, our movement needs more front-line resisters—especially those of us with privilege of various kinds—who are willing and able to throw themselves into the breach, to run toward danger, putting their bodies and freedom on the line. And we need many more people, including corporate and political and cultural leaders, ready and willing to support these people and this resistance. We not only need youth climate strikers filling the streets, we need more and more people willing to stand in the way—literally—of the carbon-industrial machine.

A recent report from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication found that 31 percent of Americans would support the use of nonviolent civil disobedience “against corporate or government activities that make global warming worse,” and 20 percent would be willing to engage in it themselves. Those are very large, significant numbers. Support for nonviolent resistance in the climate struggle is not marginal or fringe—it’s going mainstream. Which is to say, our movement is in fact building the necessary power, if we will use it, to prevent a return to business and politics as usual, end the carbon regime, and prove that another world is possible.

Are We Doomed? Yes! No! Don’t Know!: A ‘Bad Buddhist’ Manifesto for Climate Changetag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00e54ed2b7aa88330240a4bb41ca200d2019-10-16T14:43:44-04:002019-10-16T14:42:40-04:00By Wen Stephenson | Speaking honestly about the climate catastrophe is hard. One reason for this at times excruciating difficulty is that it requires us to acknowledge and to live with what we know—as well as what we don’t know. As one who writes and speaks about climate and politics, perhaps I’m not supposed to admit this, but the fact is, most days I don’t know what to say—much less do—as I stare into our climate and political abyss. Frankly, I wonder if any of us really do. The situation is unprecedented. It’s overwhelming. All bets are off.Beacon Broadside

Speaking honestly about the climate catastrophe is hard. One reason for this at times excruciating difficulty is that it requires us to acknowledge and to live with what we know—as well as what we don’t know.

As one who writes and speaks about climate and politics, perhaps I’m not supposed to admit this, but the fact is, most days I don’t know what to say—much less do—as I stare into our climate and political abyss. Frankly, I wonder if any of us really do. The situation is unprecedented. It’s overwhelming. All bets are off. And for a lot of us who are trying to face this, there can be a kind of paralysis—a blank, frozen, deer-in-the-headlights feeling.

Which, as it turns out, is a pretty good description of how I oftentimes feel when I’m sitting face to face with my longtime Zen teacher—a respected Zen master whose own teacher, Seung Sahn Soen-sa, always emphasized what he called “don’t know mind.” (“What am I? Don’t know! What is the meaning of my life? Don’t know! Only go straight—don’t know. Try try try, ten thousand years non-stop. Save all beings from suffering.”) And so I’m sitting there, and my teacher has given me a kong-an, or koan, one of those Zen riddles or impossibly paradoxical questions that the student is supposed to answer without hesitation—and I’m stuck, unable to answer, unable to move or speak, until after several seconds, as is the custom, I hit the floor with the palm of my hand—boom!—and grunt, “Don’t know!” And my teacher smiles at me compassionately and shakes his head. “You think too much. You read too many books. Put it all down. You already have the answer. Show me. Teach me.” Which, of course, is no help at all, given my attachment to words and thinking—and, yes, knowing—and I fail again. (I don’t always fail, but mostly I do.)

I’m still relatively new at this. I’ve only been a student of Zen Buddhist teaching and practice for about a dozen years, and I hasten to add, not a very “good” one. I’m a “bad” Buddhist. In fact I’m sucha bad Buddhist that I’m actually—dare I say it?—a Christian, of sorts. (The not very “good” sort.) Like other spiritually restless types—Thomas Merton comes to mind—I find the two traditions, when held in balance, to be mutually supporting.

So it’s with a keen awareness of my own attachments and limitations and constant failings that I approach the topic at hand and the whole question hanging over it—itself a kind of koan, an unanswerable question that nevertheless demands an answer: Is it too late? Are we, to put it politely, doomed? And what would Buddha do?

***

First of all, what does “too late” even mean? Too late for what? And what is “doom”? And who’s the “we” in that statement? In what sense have “we”—as humans, as living creatures—ever not been doomed? Isn’t “doom” just another word for impermanence? I mean, the Earth itself will someday no longer exist.

But even if we’re only speaking specifically in terms of the topic at hand, climate catastrophe, is “doom” really the word for it? Is it really a simple binary, doomed or not doomed? Of course, according to most climate scientists, it’s almost certainly too late to prevent “catastrophic” climate change on some scale, at least by any humane definition; indeed it’s already happening in many parts of the world, starting with the poorest, most vulnerable, and least powerful. But the same scientists tell us there’s still a wide range of possible outcomes within this century and beyond. Just how catastrophic the human situation will get, and how fast, is unknown—and still depends a great deal on what human beings do, most importantly what we do politically, right now and in the coming years. And no matter what happens, many billions of human beings, and countless non-human, will live into the coming decades and centuries, however catastrophic they may be—and precisely because of that, our choices and actions still matter a great deal. Perhaps more than we can imagine. Perhaps more than ever before in human history. Because we don’t know exactly when it will be “too late” (again, too late for what?), or what may prove to be possible—politically, technologically, humanly—if enough of us have the resolve to keep pushing hard enough, relentlessly enough. We simply don’t know. That’s the point.

Perhaps, then, it’s better to say that we’re both “doomed” and “not doomed,” that it’s both “too late” and “not too late”—or, at least, not entirely too late, quite yet.

***

What, then, would Buddha do? It’s a question that might interest anyone, not only Buddhists, but in order to answer it, one needs to know what“Buddha”is. I don’t mean the Buddha, the quasi-historical figure who sat beneath a tree, woke up to the morning star, and founded Buddhism, but rather, Buddhism’s ultimate truth, the ineffable essence of its teaching. And, as it happens, the question “What is Buddha?” turns out to be one of the oldest of koans in the Zen (or Chan) Buddhist tradition—which means, admittedly, that we may not get very far with this line of inquiry. When a monk asked the great Chan master Yun-men, who lived a thousand years ago in China, this very question—“What is Buddha?”—Yun-men answered: “Dry shit on a stick!”

OK. But maybe that’s not all Buddha is. Hopefully not.

Maybe another way to pose the question, “What is Buddha?”—and here I go thinking too much again—is simply to ask, “What is compassion?”After all, no compassion, no Buddha; no compassion, no Buddhism. What is Buddha? What is compassion?

Surely compassion is more than just a word, more than just an abstract concept. What is it, then? Don’t know? As my teacher would tell me, just saying the words “don’t know” won’t cut it. “Show me. Right here in this moment. You already have the answer.”

Even a child knows what compassion is. Someone is sad and needs a hug, you give them a hug. Someone is thirsty, you give them something to drink. Someone is sick, you tend to them. Someone is in danger, you protect them. Someone is suffering as a direct result of your actions, or inaction, you change your behavior so that they will no longer suffer. Someone is suffering because of your government’s actions or inaction, or because of the oppressive political system under which you live, you work with others and try to change your government or your whole political system.

Maybe Buddha is simply compassionate direct action. Maybe compassion is as easy as a hug and as hard as a revolution.

There’s an old saying: “Zen is sitting, Zen is walking, Zen is lying down.” So, what would Buddha do? Don’t know. But maybe Buddha would be sitting-in. Maybe Buddha would be walking, marching, in a crowd. Maybe Buddha would be lying down—or locking down—in front of pipelines and bulldozers and militarized police. Maybe Buddha would be shutting shit down. Maybe Buddha would revolt.

Maybe Mahatma Gandhi, and everyone with Gandhi, was Buddha. Maybe the Reverend Dr. King, and everyone with King, was Buddha. Maybe everyone at Standing Rock was Buddha. Maybe Black Lives Matter and the Poor People’s Campaign and #AbolishICE—maybe all the kids walking out of school to join the climate strikes and demand that we face up to the facts—are all Buddha. Maybe all of us, including the police, are Buddha—if we only wake up and realize it.

Near the end of my book about the climate-justice movement, I note how the American poet Gary Snyder, a Zen Buddhist, wrote a short prose-and-verse piece in 2001 called “After Bamiyan,” about the destruction of the ancient Buddhas of Bamiyan in Afghanistan. In this piece, Snyder recalls his correspondence at the time with a fellow Buddhist who remarked that since Buddhism teaches the impermanence of all things, what did any of it really matter?

To which Snyder replies, “Ah yes . . . impermanence. But this is never a reason to let compassion and focus slide, or to pass off the sufferings of others because they are merely impermanent beings.”

And then Snyder quotes a famous haiku by the Japanese poet Issa, which he translates:

This dewdrop world Is but a dewdrop world And yet—

Snyder adds: “That ‘and yet’ is our perennial practice. And maybe the root of the Dharma.”

Will We Beat the 12-Year Countdown to Our Projected Climate Crisis?tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00e54ed2b7aa8833022ad39a0ae5200d2018-10-18T17:17:30-04:002019-04-22T09:51:14-04:00The deadline is 2030. By then, if we don’t do everything in our power to curb the causes of global warming, it’ll be too late. The world’s leading climate scientists issued this warning in a report at the latest UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Among the worst-case scenarios forecast in the report are inundated coastlines, intensifying droughts, extreme heat, and poverty. It’s harrowing to think about. Will the panic around the report incite us as a species to take a stand for our survival and climate justice for the future? Can we keep global warming at a maximum of 1.5 degrees Celsius? We reached out to our authors who specialize in environmental issues to find out. Beacon Broadside

The deadline is 2030. By then, if we don’t do everything in our power to curb the causes of global warming, it’ll be too late. The world’s leading climate scientists issued this warning in a report at the latest UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Among the worst-case scenarios forecast in the report are inundated coastlines, intensifying droughts, extreme heat, and poverty. It’s harrowing to think about. Will the panic around the report incite us as a species to take a stand for our survival and climate justice for the future? Can we keep global warming at a maximum of 1.5 degrees Celsius? We reached out to some of our authors to find out.

***

“‘Twelve years to save the planet,’ say the headlines about the latest IPCC report. It is easy to understand the need to set a deadline, and the scientist are probably right that, if we haven’t sharply turned towards lower global emissions of planet-warming gases by 2030, then it will be too late to stop warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius, the ambitious Paris target. The problem is it suggests climate change has an on-off switch. It’s not like that. We are already one degree warmer. Nothing will change overnight in twelve years if we don’t act. If there are tipping points that might accelerate things, we don’t know where they lie. Most likely, the world will just keep getting warmer, and the weather will keep getting wilder and more extreme.

Climate change is cumulative. Once in the air, carbon dioxide takes centuries to go away, so every time we add another tonne we are just turning up the planet’s thermostat another notch. We have to stop. Unless we get back to zero emissions, the warming will continue. To three, four, five, seven, ten degrees and beyond. The sooner we stop, the less bad it will be. And if we can find ways to start drawing down carbon dioxide—by reforesting the planet, for instance—then we can put things into reverse. It’s that simple.” —Fred Pearce, Fallout: Disasters, Lies, and the Legacy of the Nuclear Age

“The recent report from the UN that catastrophic consequences due to climate change are looming ahead for the future of the biosphere come as no surprise too many of us. But for the public, this scenario doesn’t feel actionable. Perhaps it’s just too big, leaving citizens not sure where to start, or it feels too hopeless.

“One of the trickiest social psychology questions of the twenty-first century has been how to motivate climate change action. For better or worse, one of the only sufficiently powerful motivators might just be the increased urgency of shrinking timelines. We can bolster this short-sighted self-interest with effective activism strategies that leverage the minority of the population that has a longer time horizon, but the lingering question is whether we can motivate global action on the elephants in the room—like animal agriculture at over 14% of greenhouse gas emissions—before we’ve locked in catastrophe. Fortunately, some powerful technologies are peeking over the horizon, such as so-called ‘clean meat,’ real meat made without animals, that could facilitate dramatic reductions in emissions over the coming years.” —Jacy Reese, The End of Animal Farming: How Scientists, Entrepreneurs, and Activists Are Building an Animal-Free Food System

“In light of the latest climate science, it’s not panic that I worry about but the kind of fatalism that says we’re doomed, that there’s nothing to be done, and that nothing ever could have been done. As I wrote in a recent essay responding to such fatalism, this betrays a fundamental misunderstanding or mischaracterization of the climate crisis. We now face an all but certain climate catastrophe in the coming decades, but it’s not a binary, doomed or not-doomed, situation: just how catastrophic it will be depends on many things, the most important of which are what we do, now, politically.

It strikes me that many of the things I wrote in What We’re Fighting for Now Is Each Other which sounded extreme or even defeatist to some ears now sound commonplace, even too mild—such as, ‘it’s time now to fight like there’s nothing left to lose but our humanity.’ I still believe that statement, as long as it’s understood that the ‘fight’ takes many forms, on many fronts, including basic fights for democracy and human rights. Or where I quoted activist Tim DeChristopher, who told me that ‘holding onto our humanity’ in the face of what’s coming will be ‘a never-ending challenge’—and that ‘we need an endless movement and a constant revolution.’ Those words still ring true to me, regardless of how far we still remain from realizing them.” —Wen Stephenson, What We’re Fighting for Now Is Each Other: Dispatches from the Front Lines of Climate Justice

Henry David Thoreau, No “Pond Scum,” Risked His Neck for Racial Justicetag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00e54ed2b7aa883301b8d295c592970c2017-07-14T09:16:00-04:002019-07-11T03:39:21-04:00By Wen Stephenson | There’s a popular image of Henry David Thoreau as an apolitical hermit, a recluse, aloof and detached, even misanthropic, a crank indulging his private fantasy in his cabin in the woods. This has always been a caricature; his active involvement in the Underground Railroad and resistance to the Fugitive Slave Act put the lie to it. We know that he helped multiple fugitives on their way to Canada, guarding over them in his family’s house—the Thoreau family were committed abolitionists, especially his mother and sisters—even escorting them onto the trains, which entailed no small personal risk. And of course, we know that he wrote and spoke forcefully and without compromise against slavery and for human freedom.Beacon Broadside

There’s a popular image of Henry David Thoreau as an apolitical hermit, a recluse, aloof and detached, even misanthropic, a crank indulging his private fantasy in his cabin in the woods. This has always been a caricature; his active involvement in the Underground Railroad and resistance to the Fugitive Slave Act put the lie to it. We know that he helped multiple fugitives on their way to Canada, guarding over them in his family’s house—the Thoreau family were committed abolitionists, especially his mother and sisters—even escorting them onto the trains, which entailed no small personal risk. And of course, we know that he wrote and spoke forcefully and without compromise against slavery and for human freedom.

But in the fall of 1859, Thoreau’s principles would be put even further to the test. When the news arrived in Concord, in October 1859, of John Brown’s deadly raid on Harpers Ferry, Virginia, reactions were sharply divided. The whole country was in an uproar. Even Brown’s erstwhile supporters quickly distanced themselves. Most of his co-conspirators—many with close ties to Concord—went into hiding, several fleeing to Canada. The atmosphere was not just tense but dangerous for anyone voicing solidarity with Brown.

Into this picture steps forty-two-year-old Henry Thoreau. He was incensed by what he saw as the timid and hypocritical reactions of his neighbors, and of the press, and let it be known that he would speak in support of Brown at Concord’s First Church on October 30. Thoreau rang the town bell himself to announce the speech because Concord’s selectmen had refused. The address he gave was “A Plea for Captain John Brown.”

It was Thoreau’s most radical moment. He was the first in Concord, and among the first and most prominent in the country, to come to Brown’s defense. Within days he would repeat the speech to large audiences in Worcester and Boston—where he stood in at the last moment for Frederick Douglass, who had been chased into Canada by federal marshals despite having played no part in the Harpers Ferry raid.

The speech itself is stunning. What Thoreau was saying in his “Plea” for Brown was the same thing he’d said a decade earlier in “Civil Disobedience”—“action from principle…is essentially revolutionary”—only now in far stronger terms, and this time with real skin in the game. What was once a kind of philosophical exercise was now in deadly earnest: Brown’s raid and certain execution—and the risk of publicly aligning oneself with him—made Thoreau’s night in jail look like child’s play.

On December 2, Brown was hanged in Virginia. The next day, Thoreau himself would become an accomplice to the escape of a desperate Harpers Ferry conspirator, Francis Jackson Merriam, personally taking him out of Concord by wagon to the train in Acton. Thoreau didn’t know Merriam’s identity (he was told only to call him “Lockwood”), but he surely knew what he was doing and the risk he was taking—that this was a wanted man, with a price on his head.

. . .

On July 4, 1854, with Walden in final page proofs, Thoreau mounted a platform at Harmony Grove in Framingham—alongside William Lloyd Garrison, Sojourner Truth, and other prominent abolitionists—and addressed a fiery antislavery rally (literally fiery: Garrison lit copies of the Fugitive Slave Act and US Constitution on fire). His speech, called “Slavery in Massachusetts,” is merciless, indicting the commonwealth for the moral complacency and hypocrisy of its participation in human bondage, sending escaped slaves, free human beings, back into slavery. It was enough to shake even Thoreau’s sense of nature’s harmony:

I walk toward one of our ponds, but what signifies the beauty of nature when men are base?…Who can be serene in a country where both the rulers and the ruled are without principle? The remembrance of my country spoils my walk.

And yet, there in the final moments of the speech, he finds some reassurance:

But it chanced the other day that I scented a white water-lily, and a season I had waited for had arrived.…What confirmation of our hopes is in the fragrance of this flower! I shall not so soon despair of the world for it, notwithstanding slavery, and the cowardice and want of principle of Northern men. It suggests what kind of laws have prevailed the longest and widest, and still prevail, and that the time may come when man’s deeds will smell as sweet. Such is the odor which the plant emits. If Nature can compound this fragrance still annually, I shall believe her still young and full of vigor, her integrity and genius unimpaired, and that there is virtue even in man, too, who is fitted to perceive and love it. It reminds me that Nature has been partner to no Missouri Compromise. I scent no compromise in the fragrance of the water-lily.

Sorry, but the person who wrote and spoke those words was not “pond scum,” he was not a misanthrope, regardless of what anyone at The New Yorker magazine may say. Like all of us, he had his flaws—and yes, he could be annoying as hell. But no misanthrope speaks and acts—indeed, risks his own neck—on behalf of his fellow human beings in the way Henry Thoreau did.

“The remembrance of my country spoils my walk.”

You see, I don’t believe that. I don’t believe that the remembrance of his country merely spoiled Thoreau’s walk. I think the remembrance of his country revealed the walk’s true purpose. I believe his solitary and profoundly moral, even spiritual awakening in nature led him back to society and to a radical political engagement on behalf of other people—his neighbors, whether follow citizens of Concord or the fugitives who took refuge in Walden’s woods. Because for Henry Thoreau, to live in harmony with nature is to act in solidarity with our fellow human beings.

Science, Not Silence: A March for Science Reading Listtag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00e54ed2b7aa883301b8d27a7506970c2017-04-21T16:41:03-04:002017-04-21T16:41:03-04:00The critical role that scientific research plays in our health, safety, understanding of the natural world, and future as a species is under threat. With an administration that is pushing to suppress scientific evidence and keep scientists from communicating their findings, our need for empirical inquiry into how to protect our home and sustain our resources is more important than ever. That’s why the March for Science, an emerging and growing grassroots movement, is launching nationwide tomorrow, April 22. Scientists and science supporters, teachers and parents, global citizens and policymakers will take to the streets, united, to defend and advocate for science as a pillar of human freedom and prosperity.Beacon Broadside

Photo credit: Overpass Light Brigade

The critical role that scientific research plays in our health, safety, understanding of the natural world, and future as a species is under threat. With an administration that is pushing to suppress scientific evidence and keep scientists from communicating their findings, our need for empirical inquiry into how to protect our home and sustain our resources is more important than ever. That’s why the March for Science, an emerging and growing grassroots movement, is launching nationwide tomorrow, April 22. Scientists and science supporters, teachers and parents, global citizens and policymakers will take to the streets, united, to defend and advocate for science as a pillar of human freedom and prosperity.

Defending science, though, doesn’t end with the march. The best way to make sure science will influence policy is to encourage people to value and engage with it. As always, education is where the power for change lies. To that end, we reached out to some of our authors who write on a variety of science topics to ask for recommendations of books they’ve read. Further down, you will find a few recommended selections from our catalog, too. You can find more of our science titles from our Science and Medicine list.

Let’s march and enrich our education! And as Neil deGrasse Tyson said on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, we’re on a four-year mission to make America smart again.

Which Side Are You On?: A Speech Against Climate Science Denial and Post-Truth Politicstag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00e54ed2b7aa883301bb096b2adf970d2017-01-13T12:26:05-05:002017-01-13T13:35:30-05:00By Wen Stephenson
Some of you have heard me say this before. I’ve said it many times, and I’m going to keep on saying it, because it’s true: Given what scientists know, and have known for decades, about climate change—indeed, given what Exxon Mobil has known for decades about climate change—to deny the science, deceive the public, and obstruct any serious response to the climate catastrophe, is to ensure the destruction, the eradication, of entire countries and cultures; and the suffering and death of untold millions of human beings. There’s a word for this. These are crimes. And they’re not just financial crimes. They’re not just crimes against shareholders. They’re crimes against humanity.Beacon Broadside

On Monday, January 9, activists around the country rallied as part of 350.org’s national #DayAgainstDenial, calling on their US Senators to oppose President-elect Donald Trump’s climate science-denying Cabinet nominees, including former Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson as Secretary of State. In Massachusetts, with Democratic Senators Edward Markey and Elizabeth Warren opposed to Trump’s nominees, 350 Massachusetts called on Republican Governor Charlie Baker, whose administration is responsible for enforcing the state’s Global Warming Solutions Act, to take a firm stand against climate denial and obstruction. Beacon author Wen Stephenson delivered the following speech to a spirited crowd of more than 200 gathered on Boston Common at the foot of the steps leading to the State House.

***

It feels good out here! I like it when New England winter feels like New England winter should. Move in close! Warm each other up. Stomp your feet. OK, now repeat after me:

“Hey, Charlie Baker! Which side are you on?!”

“Hey, Charlie Baker! Which side are you on?!”

That’s good! We’re gonna come back to that in a minute.

So, it’s hard to believe, but Donald Trump’s lies, his outrageous relationship to facts, has only been a dominant feature of American politics for a little more than a year now. Seriously. It’s only been a year. Our long national nightmare is far from over.

But as unprecedented and unrelenting as Trump’s lies are, Exxon’s lies—that’s right, the same Exxon where Trump’s nominee for secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, has spent his entire career, and has led as CEO for the past decade—Exxon’s lies are more insidious, and every bit as dangerous, maybe even more dangerous. Because Exxon has been lying about climate science for decades, with impunity, “normalizing” the most cynical distortion of scientific fact.

I know Trump likes to be number one in everything, but sorry, Donald. Exxon was way ahead of you in the post-truth department. Exxon led the way.

And as I argued in a recent piece for The Nation, a political and media and educational culture that can accommodate climate denial and obstruction, in the face of ever more urgent warnings from scientists of an accelerating catastrophe, is a culture that is ripe for Donald Trump; it’s a culture that can accommodate Trump and his lies. Because it’s a culture that has already detached itself from science and physical reality, as well as from humanity. Because it’s willing to treat the majority of the human population as expendable and superfluous.

I mean, let’s be clear. Some of you have heard me say this before. I’ve said it many times, and I’m going to keep on saying it, because it’s true: Given what scientists know, and have known for decades, about climate change—indeed, given what Exxon Mobil has known for decades about climate change—to deny the science, deceive the public, and obstruct any serious response to the climate catastrophe, is to ensure the destruction, the eradication, of entire countries and cultures; and the suffering and death of untold millions of human beings. There’s a word for this. These are crimes. And they’re not just financial crimes. They’re not just crimes against shareholders. They’re crimes against humanity.

So, Governor Baker, if you’re listening, if you ever hear these words, all I want to know is: Which side are you on? Which side are you on?

What we’re fighting for here today is even bigger than science. It’s about more than carbon, more than climate change. It’s about basic human rights. It’s about democracy. It’s about who we are as Americans, who we are as people.

Because the normalization of deceit and denial is a threat not just to science, but to the fundamental values on which our constitutional democracy is founded. Because in a world where facts have been abolished, an Orwellian world where 2+2=5, where the official version of reality changes day to day—where one day climate change is a hoax invented by China, and the next day you’ve got a nominee for secretary of state who says with a straight face that he accepts climate science and the Paris Agreement—in that world, there can be no basis for the kind of reasoned deliberation and rational debate on which democracy itself depends, or for the rule of law on which our basic rights, our human rights, depend.

So, Charlie Baker, which side are you on?

That’s our message for Baker. But I have another message for all of you, as people, as individuals.

This is really happening. Donald Trump is days away from becoming the forty-fifth President of the United States. And I don’t know about you, but I find that fact a little hard to accept. It can be hard to get out of bed in the morning and face this reality. I know how tempting it is to take refuge in cynicism and fatalism, to feel like nothing I do can make any difference. That’s why I have to remind myself, every morning, that cynicism and fatalism in the face of these realities are nothing less than a form of moral and intellectual cowardice. That’s right. Cowardice.

And so I just have one more thing to say to each of you right now, or rather, to ask of you. Of course, who am I to ask anything of you? I’m just one middle-aged white guy. One person, one father, one son, one brother, one friend. One fellow citizen. One fellow human being.

And what I’m asking of you is this: I’m asking you to be brave. I’m asking you to have courage.

Now, courage is going to mean something different for each one of us, depending on our situation. But make no mistake: what this moment in history requires of each of us is courage. Intellectual courage. Political courage. Moral courage. And yes, maybe even physical courage. I’m pretty sure there are going to be times when it will require physical courage.

So I’m asking of you precisely what I’m asking of myself. To be brave. We need to be able to look our neighbors in the eyes, whoever they may be—whoever they may be—and say to them: I promise to be brave. For you. And that’s what I’m promising all of you right now, right here: I promise to be brave for you.

That’s what we’re asking of Charlie Baker. To show some courage. Some political courage, some moral courage. For this Commonwealth, for this country, for humanity, for all of us.

But we can’t ask it of Charlie Baker if we’re not asking it of ourselves. So that’s why I’m asking you: Can you, will you, be brave? Will you stand and fight for the person next to you? Will you? I know that you, that we, can. And I believe—I believe—that we will. And that we will win.

Post-Election 2016 Reading to Inspire Action, Find Meaning, and Learn from Our Historytag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00e54ed2b7aa883301b7c8b25d7a970b2016-11-21T17:23:00-05:002016-12-14T15:34:09-05:00The results of the 2016 presidential election have left many people in shock and disappointment. In a time where people are fearing that a new administration will work to reverse much of the progress made in the last eight years, we are left wondering what the future holds. How do we continue to fight against climate change, fight for reproductive rights, LGBTQ protections, and racial and economic justice?Beacon Broadside

The results of the 2016 presidential election have left many people in shock and disappointment. In a time where people are fearing that a new administration will work to reverse much of the progress made in the last eight years, we are left wondering what the future holds. How do we continue to fight against climate change, fight for reproductive rights, LGBTQ protections, and racial and economic justice?

Some people are turning to different voices to learn how to step up to the task of movement-building. Some are looking for advice to help them process their post-electoral grief. Others are looking for expert analysis and critique on the current issues affecting our society. At Beacon, publishing books on these issues is our mission. Now, more than ever, these books are relevant and timely, and we need our authors’ wisdom and expertise. Below we offer a non-exhaustive list of post-election reading recommendations from our catalog.

Community activist Michael Shelton lays out concrete strategies LGBT families can use to intervene in and resolve difficult community issues, teach their children resiliency skills, and find safe and respectful programs for them.

Education journalist Linda K. Wertheimer reveals a public education system struggling with the debate over religion in the classroom and offers a roadmap for raising a new generation of religiously literate Americans.

This official companion to the Ken Burns PBS documentary tells the little-known story of the Sharps, an ordinary couple that undertook the dangerous rescue and relief missions across war-torn Europe, saving the lives of refugees, political dissidents, and Jews on the eve of World War II.

Recommended Reading for the 2016 Election Cycletag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00e54ed2b7aa883301b8d229d05d970c2016-10-18T15:10:46-04:002016-10-18T15:10:46-04:00Throughout this election cycle, we’ve seen the rise of the radical right reminiscent of the pull of ultraconservative organizations from the past; increasing calls to prevent new immigrants from entering our country; increased calls to improve gun control legislation; a resurging wave of religious intolerance against Muslim Americans; and nationwide protests imploring racial justice and economic progress. These issues and others that have made headlines in the news have become focal points in this year’s presidential debates. To help inform the conversation about these topics, we’re recommending a list of titles from our catalogue.Beacon Broadside

Photo credit: DonkeyHotey

Throughout this election cycle, we’ve seen the rise of the radical right reminiscent of the pull of ultraconservative organizations from the past; increasing calls to prevent new immigrants from entering our country; increased calls to improve gun control legislation; a resurging wave of religious intolerance against Muslim Americans; and nationwide protests imploring racial justice and economic progress. These issues and others that have made headlines in the news have become focal points in this year’s presidential debates. To help inform the conversation about these topics, we’re recommending a list of titles from our catalogue.

The Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II with Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove: The Third Reconstruction

The Reverend Dr. William J. Barber II is one of our modern-day civil rights champions and the twenty-first century’s most effective grassroots organizer. Over the summer of 2013, he led the largest state government-focused civil disobedience campaign in American history in North Carolina to protest restrictions to voting access and an extreme makeover of state government. These protests became known as Moral Mondays, an embryonic Third Reconstruction in America. This has grown into a coalition uniting people across race, class, sexual orientation, and creed. His memoir, The Third Reconstruction, written with Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, tells the stirring story of how he helped start a movement to bridge America’s racial divide and provides a blueprint for movement building.

Linda K. Wertheimer’s Faith Ed.

Courts long ago banned school teachers from preaching of any kind. But how much should schools teach about the world’s religions? In Faith Ed., veteran education journalist Linda K. Wertheimer takes us across the country to hear the voices on all sides of the new debate over religion that has pitted schools against their communities. Her fascinating investigation, which includes a return to her rural Ohio school that once ran weekly Christian Bible classes, reveals a public education system struggling to find the right path forward and offers a promising roadmap for raising a new generation of religiously literate Americans.

Dennis A. Henigan’s “Guns Don’t Kill People, People Kill People”

Is it true that when guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns? Is it true that gun control doesn’t work because criminals don’t follow the law? Is an armed society really a polite society? For decades, the gun lobby has succeeded in blocking lifesaving gun legislation by framing the gun control debate with this bumper-sticker logic. Gun law advocate Dennis A. Henigan shoots down the myths and misguided notions at the core of these pro-gun slogans in “Guns Don’t Kill People, People Kill People.” By debunking these fallacies with the most compelling current research, Henigan hopes to end the American nightmare of gun violence.

Wen Stephenson’s What We’re Fighting for Now Is Each Other

There is no denying that catastrophic climate change, by any humane definition, is upon us. The fossil-fuel industry, unfortunately, has doubled down on business as usual. The scale and urgency of the catastrophe has roused journalist Wen Stephenson to confront what he calls “the spiritual crisis at the heart of the climate crisis.” He walked away from his career in mainstream media and became an activist, joining those working to build a transformative movement for climate justice in America. What We’re Fighting for Now Is Each Other is Stephenson’s on-the-ground look at some of the “new American radicals” who are laying everything on the line to build a stronger climate justice movement—a movement he argues is more like the great human-rights and social-justice struggles of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and less like environmentalism.

Eboo Patel’s Sacred Ground

In the decade following the attacks of 9/11, suspicion and animosity toward American Muslims has grown rather than subsided, stoking the Islamophobic rhetoric that has now become frighteningly mainstream. In Sacred Ground, interfaith leader Eboo Patel says this prejudice is not just harmful to Muslims but also detrimental to the very idea of America. Pluralism, he argues, has been at the heart of the American project. Time and again it has defeated the forces of prejudice. In fact, leaders such as George Washington and Martin Luther King, Jr. were “interfaith leaders.” Now it’s up to the new generation to confront the anti-Muslim prejudice of our era.

Carole Joffe’s Dispatches from the Abortion Wars

After thirty years embedded in reproductive-health research, sociologist Carole Joffe brings together surprising and compelling firsthand accounts from doctors, health-care workers, and patients who struggle against the persistent cultural, political, and economic hurdles to access to abortion provision. Abortion has been legal for over thirty-five years in America, yet in Dispatches from the Abortion Wars, Joffe shows how the stigma still upholds barriers to access post-Roe v. Wade. Along with these portraits, Joffe’s book also offers hope for change, pointing the way to a more compassionate standard of women’s health care that responds to the needs of the individual and trusts women to make their own moral choices.

Claire Conner’s Wrapped in the Flag

Long before the rise of the Tea Party movement and the prominence of today’s religious Right, the John Birch Society, established in 1958, championed many of the same radical causes touted by ultraconservatives today. The daughter of one of the society’s first members and a national spokesperson about the society, Claire Conner grew up surrounded by dedicated Birchers and was expected to abide by and espouse Birch ideals. Forced to join at age thirteen, she became the youngest member of the society. It would take momentous changes in her own life before Conner finally freed herself of the legacy in which she was raised. Wrapped in the Flag is her intimate account of one of the most radical right-wing movements in our history and its lasting effects on our political discourse today.

Lennard Davis’s Enabling Acts

The American with Disabilities Act (ADA) is the widest-ranging and most comprehensive piece of civil rights legislation ever passed in the United States, yet the surprising story of how it came to be is little known. Acclaimed disability scholar Lennard Davis has written the first significant book on the history and the impact of ADA. Far from a dry account of bills and speeches, Enabling Acts recreates the dramatic tension of a story filled with indefatigable disability groups, advocates, and political heavyweights on the front lines of bringing about a truly bipartisan bill. This behind-the-scenes and on-the-ground narrative will make readers realize why the ADA has become the model for disability-based laws around the world.

Aviva Chomsky’s “They Take Our Jobs!” and 20 Other Myths About Immigration

“Immigrants take Americans’ jobs, are a drain on the American economy, contribute to poverty and inequality, destroy the social fabric.” History professor Aviva Chomsky dismantles these common assumptions and others in “They Take Our Jobs!” and 20 Other Myths about Immigration. By debunking these myths, Chomsky shows how the parameters and presumptions of today’s immigration debate distort how we think and have been thinking about immigration. The notion that non-citizens are created equal is absent from the public discussion. This myth-busting book argues that the dividing line is citizenship.

Deborah Jian Lee’s Rescuing Jesus

Frustrated by its conservative politics and its culture wars, journalist Deborah Jian Lee left the evangelical world. She, however, has stayed close to those in the movement over the years and came to find that a new generation of evangelicals—LGBTQ and straight; white, black, Asian, Hispanic, and indigenous—are reclaiming the movement by pushing it in a more progressive direction. Women are rising in the ranks despite familiar sermons about female submission. Today’s young evangelicals are more likely than their elders to accept same-sex marriage. Lee’s Rescuing Jesus unpacks the diverse and complex strands of this movement, and argues how important it is for the future of evangelicalism and for the future of our country.

Mirta Ojito’s Hunting Season

Latinos, primarily men and not all of them immigrants, have become the target of hate crimes in recent years as the nation wrestles with swelling numbers of undocumented immigrants and the prevalence of anti-immigrant rhetoric. Marcelo Lucero, a thirty-seven-year-old undocumented Ecuadorean immigrant who worked at a dry cleaner’s, was one of the victims, murdered by a group of Long Island teenagers in the village of Patchogue. In Hunting Season, journalist Mirta Ojito draws from firsthand interviews and on-the-ground reporting to provide and unflinching and invaluable look at one of our most pressing issues.

A Prayer for West Roxbury—and the Worldtag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00e54ed2b7aa883301bb09077391970d2016-05-27T09:00:00-04:002016-05-27T09:00:00-04:00By Wen Stephenson
On Wednesday morning in Boston’s West Roxbury neighborhood, an interfaith group of sixteen Boston-area religious leaders—Jewish, Christian, Buddhist, Hindu—sat down and held a prayer service in the middle of Grove Street, physically blocking construction of Spectra Energy’s fracked-gas West Roxbury Lateral pipeline, part of a major expansion of its Algonquin Incremental Market (AIM) pipeline system. All told, their civil disobedience brought the number of arrests for nonviolent direct action along the construction route to more than eighty since October (including my own on April 28).Beacon Broadside

Sixteen interfaith clergy about to be arrested to #StopSpectra. Photo credit: Wen Stephenson

They sang, they prayed, and when the cuffs were put on, they went as they came—peacefully.

On Wednesday morning in Boston’s West Roxbury neighborhood, an interfaith group of sixteen Boston-area religious leaders—Jewish, Christian, Buddhist, Hindu—sat down and held a prayer service in the middle of Grove Street, physically blocking construction of Spectra Energy’s fracked-gas West Roxbury Lateral pipeline, part of a major expansion of its Algonquin Incremental Market (AIM) pipeline system. All told, their civil disobedience brought the number of arrests for nonviolent direct action along the construction route to more than eighty since October (including my own on April 28).

In some ways, such protests of this pipeline—which will end at a compressor station across the street from West Roxbury Crushed Stone, an active quarry where weekly blasting shakes the foundations of neighborhood homes—are hardly even controversial. Residents don’t want a dangerous high-pressure (750 psi) pipeline running yards away from their front doors. The City Council has voted unanimously to oppose it. The mayor is challenging the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the industry-captured Washington agency that rubber stamped the project, in court. Boston’s state and federal legislators are against the project. Opponents note that no one has demonstrated sufficient demand to justify a massive new gas pipeline into Boston—which already has at least 3,000 documented leaks in its decrepit distribution system, as researchers at Boston University have shown.

You might think that in a democracy this project wouldn’t get built.

Most reporting on this pipeline fight has centered on these real and pressing local concerns. And yet the reasons to stop this project extend far beyond Boston.

Thanks to convincing studies by researchers at Harvard and Cornell showing vast methane leakage throughout the U.S. production and distribution system, we now know that increasing our reliance on fracked gas is a catastrophe not only for local communities but for the global climate—meaning for today’s young people and future generations, beginning with the poorest and most vulnerable, whether in Boston or Bangladesh.

Far from being a climate-friendly “bridge fuel,” science shows that fracked gas, because of all that leaking methane—a far more potent greenhouse gas than CO2 in the near term—is little if any better, and possibly worse, than coal when it comes to global warming. At the very moment when fossil-fuel use needs to plummet—even as carbon emissions from Massachusetts power plants are rising and the state is failing to meet its legally-mandated emissions cuts—our kids can’t afford for us to build any new fossil-fuel infrastructure, including gas.

We know that we can meet our energy needs without these new pipelines. Indeed, rigorous analysis shows that we can replace fossil fuels entirely by mid-century—as the international scientific consensus says is necessary if we’re at all serious about climate change. Doing so, however, will require responding to the climate crisis as the global emergency, and global injustice, that it is.

So the clergy sang and prayed on Grove Street, and put their bodies in the way of a pipeline, with a simple message: Business as usual got us into this fix; business as usual ends here.

Does that appear extreme? Business as usual is extreme.

In his 1963 “Letter From a Birmingham Jail,” the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. answered charges of extremism from his fellow clergy. “Was not Jesus an extremist in love?” King wrote. “Was not Amos an extremist for justice...So the question is not whether we will be extremist but what kind of extremist will we be...Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice—or will we be extremists for the cause of justice?”

Facing the Factstag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00e54ed2b7aa883301bb088fe329970d2015-11-12T17:17:33-05:002015-11-13T15:14:19-05:00Wen Stephenson was invited by the Reverend Kyle Childress, longtime pastor of Austin Heights Baptist Church in Nacogdoches, Texas and one of the key voices in What We’re Fighting For Now Is Each Other, to speak to the congregation. The church's congregation plays a crucial role in the resistance to the southern leg of the Keystone XL pipeline. They supported the Tar Sands Blockade and welcomed young blockaders into their homes.Beacon Broadside

Wen Stephenson was invited by the Reverend Kyle Childress, longtime pastor of Austin Heights Baptist Church in Nacogdoches, Texas and one of the key voices in What We’re Fighting For Now Is Each Other, to speak to the congregation. The church's congregation plays a crucial role in the resistance to the southern leg of the Keystone XL pipeline. They supported the Tar Sands Blockade and welcomed young blockaders into their homes.

Stephenson tells us: “By uncanny coincidence, I was in Houston, doing an event with the grassroots group TEJAS (Texas Environmental Justice Advocacy Services)—whose founders Juan and Bryan Parras, and organizer Yudith Nieto, figure prominently in the book—when the news broke that President Obama had rejected the Keystone XL pipeline, or the northern leg of it. And the very next day I went up to Nacogdoches. Too many people, especially in our national media, have forgotten that the southern leg of the pipeline was built with Obama’s blessing, and that it began pumping tar-sands crude to refineries in Port Arthur and Houston in January 2014.”

He adds: “I realize now that this book project wasn't truly finished until I went back to Nacogdoches and spoke to the people of that church community. It really closed the circle for me, in a profound way.”

“Be still, and know that I am God.”

Those words from the Psalm are among my mother’s favorite in the entire Bible. And believe me, my mother—who will be eighty-four next month—knows her Bible.

My mother always wanted me to be a preacher. As some of you know, although I was born and raised in southern California, my whole family, going back several generations, is from Texas, and I was raised in the Church of Christ. My mom prayed that I would go to Abilene Christian—where she met and married my dad, who was born and raised about three hours north of here, just east of Paris, Texas, where my grandparents were sharecroppers in the Great Depression. And she prayed that I’d become a preacher. Well, it didn’t quite work out that way. And yet here I am, at the age of forty-seven, almost forty-eight, finally delivering a sermon in a Texas church. When I told my mom about it, she was pretty excited. She didn’t even mind that it’s a Baptist church! (evidence, if there ever was any, that we are truly entering an ecumenical age.)

Maybe because of my family background, the first time I walked into this church, in July of 2013, I felt instantly at home. I felt like I was among family. And because I still feel that way, I’m going to go out on a limb right now, and take a leap of faith, and get real personal with you.

I’m coming up on a big anniversary. In April 2006, ten years ago this coming spring, I woke up. It’s that simple. I woke up. It’s hard to put an exact date on it. There wasn’t really any single moment, any more than there’s a single moment when night turns to day. But sometime in the early part of that month, almost a decade ago, I woke up to the reality of my situation—and somehow, by the grace of God, I was able to accept it, and act upon it.

You see, I woke up and accepted the fact that I had a very serious drinking problem—that I was, in fact, addicted to alcohol. I had reached the point where I had to accept the fact that if I didn’t change my life, and I mean radically change it, then I would not only end up killing myself, I would cause my children—my son who was then six, and my daughter who was two—and everyone else I loved, especially my wife, Fiona—incalculable and irreparable suffering.

That’s right. And as I stand here today, I can tell you that I have not had a drop of alcohol, or any other inebriating substance, since April 18, 2006—and I feel no desire to ever again. It’s no longer a struggle.

“Be still, and know that I am God.”

That’s the verse, and the deep, deep realization, which I learned from my mother, that helped me save my life and my children’s lives. I had to learn how to “be still, and know”—to accept God, or whatever it is that I, in my feeble humanity, understand as “God”—and know that I can live, day to day, even moment to moment, without alcohol. That I can be sober—completely, stone-cold, sober—for the rest of my life. And so I learned to be still, and to sit still—literally, sit still. I even took up Zen Buddhist meditation, something I practice to this day—indeed, I practiced this morning. And slowly but surely, I learned that I could live with the fear and anxiety—fear and anxiety that gnawed at my gut, and some days still gnaws at it, like a starving animal. I’d been trying to medicate myself, anesthetize myself, with alcohol. But in that place of stillness, and silence, as I faced the facts, I found a peace that passes all understanding, and I knew then, as I know now, that by the grace of God, I can do what needs to be done.

***

Why am I telling you all this about myself?

Because about four years later, in the spring of 2010, I woke up to another, far bigger, and, if possible, even more devastating set of facts. And if I thought coming to terms with my addiction was difficult, coming to terms with this new set of facts would be, if anything, even more so. Indeed, I’m still struggling to come to terms with them.

I’m talking about the set of scientific facts about human-driven climate change, and the political facts about our failure to address it. I mean the fact that because we have delayed so long—living, like addicts, in collective denial—catastrophic global warming is now upon us, arriving sooner and faster than the world’s climate scientists ever predicted.

I woke up to the fact that massive climate disruption is all but guaranteed within my own children’s lifetimes, quite possibly my own lifetime, and that if we don’t, as a society and a global human community, take radical steps, starting now, to transform our energy systems and decarbonize our economies—which, in this country, will require a profound political transformation and a society-wide mobilization—today’s children and future generations will inherit a planet inhospitable to human life and civilization, with all the chaos that comes with it.

We’re told that “catastrophic warming” can still be avoided—that’s what the negotiations in Paris starting at the end of this month will be all about. But catastrophic warming, by any humane definition, is already happening. Because even now, what’s “catastrophic” depends on where you live, and how poor you are, and more often than not the color of your skin. If you’re one of the billions of people who live in the world’s poorest and most vulnerable places—the vast majority of them people of color, historically and presently oppressed under the legacy of slavery and colonialism, under a global economic system built on white supremacism, the same economic system driving climate change today—if you’re one of those people, from Bangladesh to sub-saharan Africa, from the Philippines to New Orleans or West Port Arthur the east side of Houston, then the intensifying storms, floods, droughts, heat waves we’re already seeing can be catastrophic.

The question now is not whether we’re going to “stop global warming,” or “solve the climate crisis.” It’s whether humanity will act quickly and decisively enough to salvage civilization itself—in any form worth salvaging. Whether any kind of stable, humane, and just future—any kind of just society—is still possible.

And it is. It is still possible. From a technical standpoint, that’s what the world’s climate and energy experts want us to understand. The obstacles, as insurmountable as they may seem, are no longer technological or financial. They’re political. Which is to say, they’re moral. We need a political and moral revolution—what the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., in his great speech at the Riverside Church in April 1967, called “a genuine revolution of values.”

***

Look, this is hard. Coming to terms with the climate catastrophe is hard. It’s frightening, it’s infuriating, it’s heartbreaking. It forces us into a dark night of the soul. One of the things I’ve found in talking with so many people, is that there’s a spiritual crisis at the heart of the climate crisis.

So in the face of all this, how does one respond?

Rather than retreat into various forms of denial and fatalism and cynicism, more and more people, and especially a young generation of activists, have reached the conclusion that something more than merely “environmentalism,” and virtuous green consumerism, is called for. That the only thing offering any chance of getting through what’s coming with our humanity intact, is the kind of transformative social and political movement that has altered the course of history in the past. A movement like those that have made possible what was previously unthinkable, from abolitionism to civil rights. A movement that is as much spiritual as political. Because the movements that change the world are moral movements. They’re spiritual.

Some of the people engaged in building that movement, engaged in creating communities of resistance, and communities of resilience—resistance and resilience—some of them I met right here in this church. Wide-awake people who have faced the facts, and honestly confronted despair—and yet, somehow, have found the resolve to keep fighting. Young people who went to jail and even risked their lives to try and stop a pipeline—and to bear moral witness before the eyes of the world to everything that pipeline represented and still, here in East Texas and Port Arthur and Houston, represents: the corporate greed, the political corruption, the environmental injustice and racism, the disregard for human rights and human life.

And those of you I met here in this church, who stood by those young people, in some cases literally stood with them, and who took them into your homes, and fed them, and comforted them, and loved them. Loved them.

And don’t you believe for a minute that what happened here, and up and down that pipeline route, didn’t matter or make a difference, or that it was a lost cause. The President of the United States of America just stopped the rest of that pipeline from being built, and the hundreds of thousands of barrels of tar sands it would have carried, in no small part because of the national resistance that was galvanized by what people did here, showing the world what it looks like to stand up against impossible odds. Yes, it’s a bittersweet victory. And yes, it’s just one pipeline. And yes, Montgomery, Alabama was just one southern city. And that bus that Rosa Parks sat down in, and stayed sitting, was just one city bus.

Those young people here and in Houston, and those of you here in this church, were among those who showed me what it is we’re really fighting for—who taught me that, given the facts we now face, our struggles for social justice and human rights and for community—what Rev. Dr. King called the “beloved community”—matter more than ever. Who taught me that, given everything we now know, it’s time to fight like there’s nothing left to lose but our humanity. Who taught me that what we’re fighting for now is each other. That’s what love looks like.

It won’t always look like fighting a pipeline, or keeping carbon in the ground. More often than not, it’s going to look like fighting for our brothers and sisters across town and across the tracks. Because it matters more than ever what kind of a society we’re going to have, what kind of community we’re going to have, what kind of a people we’re going to be, as we face this future together.

***

Jesus didn’t run away from the facts. He faced them. He accepted them. Jesus faced the facts, even though they led him to hell and back, though they led him into despair, and through despair, to peace and resolve and self-sacrificing action.

On the night of the Last Supper, Jesus told the apostles, “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid.”

“Be still,” he might as well have said, “and know that I am God.”

The victory Jesus won that night, in the garden, as he prayed for the bitter cup to be taken from him, and found the resolve to answer his calling—the victory Jesus won was the triumph of love over fear. In the stillness of prayer, he faced the facts, and knew that God is love. And through love he overcame fear, and found the peace and the courage and the resolve to do what had to be done—to take up his cross. My friends, brothers and sisters, in our own darkest hours, may we, by the grace of God, do the same.

Wen Stephenson, an independent journalist and climate activist, is a contributing writer for the Nation. Formerly an editor at the Atlantic and the Boston Globe, he has also written about climate, culture, and politics for Slate, the New York Times, Grist, and the Boston Phoenix. Follow him on Twitter at @wenstephenson.

Wen Stephenson's Counter-Friction to Stop the Machinetag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00e54ed2b7aa883301bb088472ad970d2015-10-20T13:53:39-04:002015-10-20T17:07:33-04:00My mother took me to my first protest when I was six, against the Seabrook nuclear plant in New Hampshire in 1976. She also took me for walks in the local woods and taught me about trees. So I had a good grounding both in caring about nature and citizen activism, which has stayed with me throughout my life. At this point in history, the number one issue is climate change. If we don't address that, everything else will be beside the point.Beacon Broadside

My mother took me to my first protest when I was six, against the Seabrook nuclear plant in New Hampshire in 1976. She also took me for walks in the local woods and taught me about trees. So I had a good grounding both in caring about nature and citizen activism, which has stayed with me throughout my life. At this point in history, the number one issue is climate change. If we don't address that, everything else will be beside the point.

What do you look for in books dealing with these issues?

Obviously, I hope the books I look for on environmental issues will move people to action. The way to bring people in is through stories. Having something new to add to the conversation is important as well, but I look for writing that can teach about the issues by engaging readers with good writing and compelling storytelling. Whether the book is about solar power, orcas, or farming, the information is grounded in stories of people, places, struggles, hope.

And sometimes, as in literary nature writing as opposed to issue-driven books, the writing is enough—creating something beautiful in the service of nature speaks to our human connection with the “natural” world and with each other.

What drew you to Wen Stephenson's book?

As a member of the climate movement—I was active in 350—I felt Wen Stephenson’s What We’re Fighting For Now Is Each Other was the book we needed right now. A clear-eyed look at reality, brutal as it is, and stories of people working to face that reality with an effort equal to the crisis, to make their lives “a counter-friction to stop the machine” as Wen quotes from Thoreau's Civil Disobedience in the book's epigraph.

How did you come across Wen and his work?

I think Wen originally approached our director, Helene Atwan, about the book, but what I remember most is a meeting Wen and I had at the beginning, sitting outside the Cafe Vanille on Charles Street. That's when the book was really hatched. He outlined his journey since deciding to leave mainstream media: the awakening to the climate crisis that pushed him off his track, his wading into climate activism on and off the page, the spiritual aspect of the journey, and the comparison of the climate movement to abolitionism and thinking of activists as the “new radicals.” To me, that sounded like the makings of a good book.

What was it like working on the book with him?

I had one experience working with Wen that I haven't had with any other author. During the writing and editing process, we also stood shoulder to shoulder in several rallies, marches, vigils, and protests, in Maine, in Salem, Barnstable, Harvard Square, in front of the Statehouse. (And we were both in NY for the People's Climate March but didn't find each other.) Our dedication to the cause translated into our shared dedication to the book, which was a great experience.

Do you have any favorite passages from the book?

In Chapter 4, “We Have to Shut It Down,” Wen tells the story of the voyage of the Quaker peace ship, The Golden Rule, an act of civil disobedience continued by The Phoenix, to protest nuclear weapons in 1958. Not only is the story inspiring—especially to those conducting the 2013 “lobster boat protest” against a coal shipment in Brayton Point, symbolically depicted on our cover—but we just found out that The Golden Rule is sailing again as a peace ship. The urgency that drove the activists over fifty years ago is the same urgency felt by activists today: “We mean now to speak with the weight of our whole lives.”

#WeStandWithYou: Young Activists Fast for the Climatetag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00e54ed2b7aa8833019b017099a6970b2013-11-21T17:09:00-05:002013-11-27T11:06:24-05:00Yeb Sano, lead Filipino delegate, is on hunger strike for the duration of the UN Climate Conference. Environmental journalist Wen Stephenson explains why he and several young activists have joined in the cause.Beacon Broadside

Hunger allows no choiceTo the citizen or the police;We must love one another or die.

W.H. Auden wrote that, sitting in a dive on 52nd Street nearly three-quarters of a century ago, as the world plunged into darkness on September 1, 1939. I’ve been thinking of those words a lot lately. Because it feels to me, and many others I know, like we’re poised at the edge of another darkness.

It’s a darkness already visible, right now, in the Philippines, where thousands are dead and many hundreds of thousands made refugees by the force of a storm like none had ever seen.

And it’s a darkness visible in the bright corporate halls of a conference center in Warsaw, where delegates to the nineteenth annual U.N. negotiations on climate change are divided and dithering, even as the window to prevent civilizational catastrophe rapidly closes.

In those same bright halls last Monday, during the opening session, the Philippines’ lead negotiator, Naderev Yeb Saño, announced in a powerful and emotional speech that he would eat no food for the duration of the twelve-day conference, or until meaningful action was taken to address the global crisis, and sparked an international outpouring of solidarity.

It so happens that two young friends of mine, Adam Greenberg and Collin Rees, recent Boston-area college grads, are in Warsaw as youth delegates to the U.N. conference with SustainUS, and they and other young people there immediately joined Saño in his hunger strike—and have now been fasting for more than a week. (Adam and Collin are allowing themselves some liquid nutrients so they can keep up the grueling conference schedule.)

By coincidence, it also happens that I spent this past weekend with a core group of about fifty committed student climate organizers from Students For a Just and Stable Future (SJSF) at their fall convergence in Worcester, Massachusetts, as they spent two full days in trainings and strategy meetings to strengthen their network and support the fast-growing grassroots climate movement in New England and beyond. And yesterday, the SJSF groups at Tufts and Brandeis launched a weeklong fast in solidarity with Saño and the people of the Philippines (as well as their friends Adam and Collin), and held a candlelight vigil in Cambridge. (Update: See their "Open Letter: Why We Are Fasting This Week," signed by students at 74 campuses.) They’re joined by people throughout Boston and the region, and coordinated fasts and vigils are being planned around the U.S. and the world for Thursday and Friday, the final days of the Warsaw conference.

These students (many of whom I’ve come to know personally as we’ve worked side by side in the 350 Massachusetts network) understand full well what’s happening to the climate, and are acutely conscious of the fact that time is running out for their generation—and, especially, those that will follow. They know that we simply cannot wait until 2020, or even 2015, to turn things around decisively. It has to be now. And they’re prepared to engage in the kind of hard work and struggle that building their movement will require.

In an email last week, Adam Greenberg told me:

I’m fasting because we need to, as Yeb said, stop this madness. I refuse to accept that we can’t. I refuse to accept that we won’t. I refuse to let the fossil fuel companies win. This is about justice, this is about taking action, and this is about preventing harm both now and in the future. We know what needs to happen. The science and the deadly simple math could not be more clear. Walking away from these talks each year without making progress is morally unacceptable.

I followed up with some questions for the two of them, and Collin Rees was able to respond last night. Noting that expectations for what the UN process can achieve are exceedingly low, I asked if he could describe what the atmosphere at the Warsaw conference was like coming in, and how the devastation in the Philippines and the action by Yeb Saño has changed it.

Collin Rees: Expectations from the UNFCCC are traditionally very low; this has been even more true in Warsaw. There was not a lot of hope for real action coming into the talks; there was some fairly vague talk about a loss and damage mechanism and some small hopes for moving on finance. Ever since Copenhagen expectations have been kept exceedingly low to avoid disappointment—I think they’ve actually been kept artificially low through this method, and this week has shown us there’s still a lot of hope.

People are now talking about real advances in the loss and damage arena, and tangible movement on finance. Discussions on REDD+ has been surprisingly hopeful, and sessions have run late into the night as countries continue debate. It hasn’t changed everything and expectations are still low, but I think we’re seeing real movement and that’s something we can continue to push for as we move into the second week.

I also asked what the goals of SustainUS were for Warsaw, and whether they had changed, and what the US delegation’s reaction has been, if any.

CR: SustainUS’s goals for Warsaw were largely related to two campaigns—inserting intergenerational equity into the negotiating text for 2015’s agreement and sparking a climate conversation in the U.S. about this June’s upcoming Clean Air Act Section 111(d) EPA standards for existing-source power plants. Both campaigns have been going well, but the domestic efforts especially have been augmented by Haiyan’s devastation and Sano’s courageous stand. The media is connecting climate change to real impacts, and the need for climate action is clear. The upcoming EPA regulations are a simple, easy way the U.S. can instantly become a leader on climate action, by implementing aggressive standards that force the worst energy sources out of the equation. These regs will be issued; the only question is how much of an impact they will have. They’re a chance to avoid a completely dysfunctional Congress and take real action with immediate impacts.

The large majority of the U.S. delegation didn’t show up until this week, so they’ve been largely absent from the dialogue thus far. We’re planning to bring it to their attention, but we’re also cognizant of the fact that they’ve essentially been given their marching orders from Washington and have very little flexibility in their actions here in Warsaw. What we need in the U.S. is aggressive domestic action, so that in the next two years we can come to these negotiations and be a real leader in the international sphere. This fast is about solidarity with climate change victims worldwide, but it’s also about getting action back at home (in every country, not just the U.S.).

I asked Collin, as someone in his early twenties, what he wanted people to understand about what’s happening there in Warsaw right now—not just in terms of the negotiations, but in terms of what’s truly at stake.

CR: We want people to understand that negotiators are coming to the table with full knowledge of the science of climate change and its devastating impacts. They’re coming with knowledge of what needs to be done, and the steps that need to occur to get to that point.

They’re coming with all of this knowledge, they’re waving their arms and giving windy, empty speeches for two weeks, and they’re walking away WITHOUT DOING ANYTHING. This is not a process that’s subtly flawed, it’s a process that’s being hijacked by a small group of countries who refuse to commit to action. That’s morally unacceptable.

If we don’t take action on climate change, we’re condemning the entire world to an unlivable future. We’re condemning those currently living in vulnerable regions disproportionately affected by the ravages of climate change, and we’re condemning all future generations to a world incompatible with life. That’s what’s at stake here, and that’s why inaction is so unacceptable.

[Update, 11/20/13: The Guardian reports that a bloc of 132 poor and developing countries (the G77 and China) have walked out of the Warsaw negotiations in an "orchestrated move," protesting wealthy nations' refusal to discuss "loss and damage" compensation until after 2015.]

* * *

A personal note: As I post this, I’m nearing twenty-four hours without food myself1, as I fast in solidarity with Yeb Saño, the people of the Philippines, people suffering the effects of climate change everywhere—and with these young friends of mine in Warsaw and at home. It’s a small thing, not eating for a day or two, by choice. A very small thing. And yet, fasting last week and again now, it has been a profound reminder of my physical connection to, well, everyone and everything.

“No one exists alone,” Auden wrote in that same poem, “September 1, 1939,” just before the lines about hunger and love I quoted at the outset. It’s also worth noting how Auden ended that poem. After telling us that “we must love one another or die,” he leaves us in the final stanza with an image that, the more I repeat it to myself, retains an uncanny staying power:

Defenceless under the nightOur world in stupor lies; Yet, dotted everywhere,Ironic points of lightFlash out wherever the JustExchange their messages: May I, composed like themOf Eros and of dust,Beleaguered by the sameNegation and despair,Show an affirming flame.

“Poetry makes nothing happen,” Auden wrote in another famous poem (his elegy for Yeats) earlier that same year, 1939. And yes, I know, my temporary self-imposed hunger doesn’t either.

But as all those fasting this week must feel in their guts and bones, it’s not really about the fast itself. It’s about the flame that started it—and keeps us going.